Posts by Anon

America's largest radio telescope blind after falling cable slashes 100-foot gash in reflector dish

Breaking glass

They should have made the the cables as strong as the Unknown Pleasures album - it was pressed into vinyl about twice the thickness of a regular LP.

'I'm telling you, I haven't got an iPad!' – Sent from my iPad

Re: Which is why I always turn off email sigs...

How's the photocopier meant to copy that shade of blue? So inconsiderate of them.

IBM job ad calls for 12 years’ experience with Kubernetes – which is six years old

Re: Windows 2000

Ah, how quickly people forget about Project AIRhead 2000...

Linus Torvalds banishes masters, slaves and blacklists from the Linux kernel, starting now

Changing the wrong words

Why don't they change the words for master and slave in the slavery sense? Then we can keep master and slave for all the other meanings.

Euro police forces infiltrated encrypted phone biz – and now 'criminal' EncroChat users are being rounded up

Re: Why am I thinking about 1960s Batman?

Because you've been watching The Defpom's Mailbag Monday?

ZFS co-creator boots 'slave' out of OpenZFS codebase, says 'casual use' of term is 'unnecessary reference to a painful experience'

Homonym

Weave herd of it, but 2 hard.

(No /s necessary for the .uk site, I hope; don't let the side down, chaps.)

Someone got so fed up with GE fridge DRM – yes, fridge DRM – they made a whole website on how to bypass it

online profanity filters are awful

Yes, they don't really work.

dashdashnewline

Anon of Sc[aeiou]nthorpe.

Ooo, a mystery bit of script! Seems legit. Let's see what happens when we run it

Loo roll perforations

If you separate the plies and unroll one of them one turn, the perforations usually line up. I haven't tried that with 3+ ply paper.

Trump issues toothless exec order to show donors, fans he's doing something about those Twitter twerps

A new amendment! The really bigly one!

Would a president of the USA push for an amendment to the constitution of the USA that requires a presidential candidate to take a sociopath test - and be declared as /not/ a sociopath - before being allowed to be their president? I'm sure the current president could pass, of course ;)

Micros~1? ClippyZilla? BSOD Bob? There can be only one winner. Or maybe two

Crash

Too close to—what became—a Macromedia product FutureSplash, and we can all guess what name came from cutting out most of the middle letters of that.

Mirror mirror on the wall, why will my mouse not work at all?

Re: All been there

Push plates may be cheaper, but they're no use when the wind is stronger than the auto-closer.

Users of Will.i.am's Wink IoT hub ask 'Where is the love?' as they're asked to pay for a new subscription service

Re: Cue the lawsuits in 3, 2, 1...

It's even worse: they sometime say "and we may make changes at any time"... "and you should check for changes yourself"...

There should be a law against that - yeah! Change the law and don't tell the weasel-word-generators that the law has changed!

This space is intentionally left blank

Whose milk?

Had a mate who used Karen's milk when making a round of tea. Unknown to him at the time, Karen's /expressed/ milk.

UK COVID-19 contact-tracing app data may be kept for 'research' after crisis ends, MPs told

Re: It can go

Surely

(I'm a frequent visitor to the village and in regular contact with a number of the locals and they *really* took the isolation thing seriously)

is not the same as

(they *really* took the isolation thing seriously)

?

Re: It can go

"who came into contact with who" - and then they go and have siblings in other classes.

What's worse than an annoying internet filter? How about one with a pre-auth remote-command execution hole and there's no patch?

Re: It wouldn't make the slightest difference.

You're meant to notice the "your".

Lords: New IR35 off-payroll tax rules 'riddled with problems, unfairnesses, unintended consequences'

How to make it go away

Tell parliament that the rule will apply to MPs and ministers acting as consultants.

Star's rosette orbit around our supermassive black hole proves Einstein's Theory of General Relativity correct

Re: Theory?

"Oh for the days when you could still measure stuff by blowing things up..."

I present to you: the type Ia supernova. Used for measuring distances (as long as we've got the reason behind the boom! correct).

Microsoft throws a bone to those unable to leave the past behind: .NET 5 support on the way for Visual Basic

Re: v5?

There was (is) .NET Framework versions 1, 2, 3, and 4. 4 is up to 4.8 now. .NET Framework won't have more features added. 4.8 is supposedly the last version that will be made. It's only really for Windows. There was/is the Mono project for other platforms.

There was (is) .NET Core versions 1, 2, and 3. To avoid confusion with .NET Framework 4, the version after 3 will be 5. .NET Core will have more features added, and it is multi-platform.

US Homeland Security mistakenly seizes British ad agency's website in prostitution probe gone wrong

Re: Why?

Trumping over small companies countries.

Your phone wakes up. Its assistant starts reading out your text messages. To everyone around. You panic. How? Ultrasonic waves

Re: Stupid millennial pranks

We had a neighbour who had mental health problems from an early age, not aided by the extreme painkillers she needed for spine problems later in life, and having a house-bound dependent to look after in her one-bedroom flat. The local kids thought it was hilarious to knock on her door and run away.

The police came asking after her one day as she had disappeared. I have heard nothing of her since.

The kids I caught had that rabbit-in-the-headlights look. Yeah, knock-down ginger is a real laugh.

This page is currency unavailable... Travelex scrubs UK homepage, kills services, knackers other sites amid 'software virus' infection

Re: Nice holding page

Yeah, a file named App_Offline.htm will take care of it.

Where's our data, Google? Chrome 79 update 'a catastrophe' for Android devs with WebView apps

Down the well

Then Skippy would have told Timmy and the data would be saved from near-certain death.

It's a billion-ton, 14-million-mile long mysterious alien formation – and Earth is heading right into it

Is it dust or...

Is it dust or could it be empty soup tins?

Since the FCC won't act, Congress finally moves on robocalls by passing half-decent TRACED Act

Big carrot

If the wages of the head of the FCC came out of the fines, I suspect there would be a lot more fining going on.

You'll never get Huawei with this, FCC tells US telcos: Buy Chinese kit and you won't see another dime from us

Does the FCC have the authority to do this, or is this just "respect my authoritah" impotence/incompetence?

Astroboffins spot the most energetic photons yet from gamma ray burst – and here's hoping Earth is right in the way of the next one

Re: Here's hoping..

What would be good is if a massive asteroid was on its way to destroy the Earth but a gamma-ray burst hit the asteroid before it got here and saved us all.

Not LibreOffice too? Beloved open-source suite latest to fall victim to the curse of Catalina

<cough /> Please check the batteries in your sarcasm detector...

Shall we strip price caps from .org, mulls ICANN. Hm, people seem really upset... OK, let's do it

I can see an opportunity here...

Make icann.org $10,000,000 per year. See if they learn anything from that.

Buckminsterfullerene sounds like the next UK Prime Minister but trust us, it's in fact the largest molecule yet found in interstellar space

Re: News?

Yes:-

22 May 2010 - NASA Telescope Finds Elusive Buckyballs in Space

"PASADENA, Calif. -- Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have discovered carbon molecules, known as "buckyballs," in space for the first time..."

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/news/spitzer20100722.html

Astroboffins spot one of the oldest, coolest stars in the universe lurking in the Milky Way

Hydrogen is a *good* coolant

Hydrogen is used in cooling, for example, generators in power stations because its low density, high specific heat, and high thermal conductivity make it a good coolant.

So the "Hydrogen is a poor coolant, so early gas clouds were very hot..." paragraph might need re-working.

Neutron star crash in a galaxy far, far... far away spews 'faster than light' radio signal jets at Earth

Phew!

We were lucky to be able to observe this event, because if the jet had been pointed much closer to Earth, the gamma ray emissions would have turned the planet into plasma, along with the rest of the solar system.

EE: Data goes TITSUP* for Brit mobile customers

They can't afford to fix it

Their top-up payment system was broken over the weekend (it may still be). So that's, what, a million pounds? down on what they would have had. Multiply that by the several times a year their payment system falls down and you can see why they can't make a profit.

~ Anon of Disgruntledford

Microsoft patches Windows to cool off Intel's Meltdown – wait, antivirus? Slow your roll

Re: No Mention of AVG!

AVG, 2018-01-04: "Thank you so much for bringing this to our attention."

https://support.avg.com/answers?id=9060N000000TrZgQAK

Seagate's lightbulb moment: Make read-write heads operate independently

Re: Worth the effort?

I suggested the sets of heads on opposite corners a long time ago. Double the rate of read-after-write verification. Read an entire track in half the time. Zero adjacent track-to-track seek time. But would they listen? Noooo.

Opportunity rover survives Martian winter for eighth time

Re: Martian Winter

For those readers younger than us, the "more advanced cuisine" is revealed in

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SAbJjktk7E

One-third of mobile users receive patchy to no indoor coverage

If it ain't broke...

Every time EE "upgrade" the service around me I get a more intermittent signal. It was least bad when EE was Orange and T-Mobile. I guess one "upgrade" would have been switching off one of the masts, and another would have been changing to a frequency that now barely makes into the street, let alone indoors. In a town with a population >60,000, not in some far-away rural location.

Hop on, Average Rabbit: Latest extortionware menace flopped

Re: [dot] com

Some browsers speculatively go off and try to load anything that looks like a URL, so it's best to stop it from looking too much like one.

A search for "Firefox stealthily loads webpages when you hover over links" will lead to useful information.

Belarus declares war on imaginary country within borders of Belarus that is better than Belarus

I got a very nice loupe from a company in Belarus. Apparently they used to make the optics for USSR spy satellites.

Wisconsin advances $3bn bribe incentives package for Foxconn

Re: Er.... But.... Isn't LCD a thing of the past?

"there are zero OLED laptop displays"

There's the Alienware 13 for a start.

Atomic bonds: Gigabyte, Supermicro fire out boosted Atom CPU range

Re: Coming soon

> It also has features you don't get on low-end boards:

> 1) EEC RAM

Or, in the UK only, BREXIT RAM.

Boffins' five eyes surprise: Bees correct colour for ambient light

they should taste of honey

Judge issues search warrant for anyone who Googled a victim's name

Searching for the facts

I suppose the phone number at the top of the fax could have been faked, or be a local library number.

We don't want to alarm you, but PostScript makes your printer an attack vector

Re: 00 BORED

PC LOAD FRENCH LETTER

UK warships to have less firepower than 19th century equivalents as missiles withdrawn

Re: Where's Nigel Farage ...

He might not be happy about having rockets strapped to him and being left outside in all weathers.

Microsoft: Watch out millennials for evil Security Essentials

Nothing is beyond our reach

Well, except for finding out who the phone number belongs to and getting the FBI to knock on their door.

Rosetta spacecraft set for smash landing

Status: food

It's a hungry little probe, isn't it?

NOM NOM NOM

NOM NOM

Plusnet outage leaves customers unable to stream Netflix. Horrors!

Re: 38Mb?

Maybe it's a Ponzi scheme, but using bandwidth instead of money.

Apple seeks patent for paper bag - you read that right, a paper bag

It'll never float

If there's one thing the SBS don't want their bags made from, it would probably be paper.